With oil and gasoline prices spiking amid President Trump’s war with Iran, it was an awkward moment for optimism about the world’s energy situation.
But Energy Secretary Chris Wright brought a sunny message to Houston last week at a gathering of energy ministers from the G20 nations. The Trump administration, he said, was ushering in an era of energy abundance by expanding oil and gas supplies in places like Alaska and Venezuela.
That pitch was often overshadowed by the effects of the conflict in the Middle East. Between lauding oil and gas deals, Mr. Wright fielded questions about a damaged Saudi oil pipeline and sparred on social media with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, over surging gasoline costs.
Mr. Wright acknowledged some tension, though he insisted it was temporary.
“Everyone’s frustrated with higher energy prices,” he said of the mood at the meeting. “But I’ve not met one person who’s comfortable with a nuclear-armed Iran. So everyone gets what we’re doing and this is a critically important mission. It creates dislocations in the short term. But the only answer to short-term dislocations is the energy abundance agenda.”
The situation was familiar for Mr. Wright, 61, one of the most forceful defenders of Mr. Trump’s vision of “energy dominance.”
Over the past two years, the administration has dismantled efforts to tackle climate change and ended support for wind and solar power. Instead, officials have sought to expand the use of oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy — sources they see as more reliable. The aim, they say, is to reduce consumer prices, increase U.S. fuel exports, and provide enough electricity to win the artificial intelligence race against China.
Mr. Wright, a former fracking executive, has been out front in articulating that shift.
Whereas Mr. Trump speaks bluntly about energy — chanting “drill, baby, drill,” calling wind turbines ugly, or claiming that global warming is a hoax — Mr. Wright gives his arguments an intellectual gloss.
He cites figures on how solar panels underperform during winter storms. Or he argues that global warming is not as big a problem as energy poverty, which he says can only be alleviated with more oil, gas and coal, even if that means more planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
Administration allies say that has made Mr. Wright invaluable.
“He has been one of the most consequential picks for energy secretary I’ve seen,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a research group that promotes fossil fuels. “He’s very experienced, brings a lot of substance, and he articulates President Trump’s vision clearly.”
Critics say Mr. Wright’s approach ignores the real risks of climate change and dismisses two of the world’s fastest-growing power sources, wind and solar. They also point to rising energy costs — diesel prices have hit record highs and electricity rates are still increasing faster than inflation — as evidence that the administration’s policies aren’t working.
During his Senate confirmation hearing last year, Mr. Wright appeared to reassure lawmakers that he supported all energy sources, including renewables. He cited his graduate work on solar power and called climate change a “global challenge that we need to solve.”
But since taking office, he has been more combative, deriding wind and solar power as a “parasite” on the grid, blasting Democratic-led states for environmental policies that have shut down coal and gas plants, and accusing Europe of being in thrall to a “climate cult” that is crippling economic growth.
The Energy Department infuriated Democrats in Congress last year by canceling nearly $8 billion in Biden-era clean energy grants located almost entirely in states that didn’t vote for Mr. Trump. Administration officials later conceded in court filings that the cancellations had been announced for political reasons.
In response, Mr. Wright has said that his agency recommended a broader set of grants to cancel in red and blue states alike, without regards to politics, and wasn’t involved in the White House’s decision on which terminations to announce.
Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico was one of eight Democrats who voted to confirm Mr. Wright last year but has since become a vocal critic.
“Of all the Trump nominees, I am particularly disappointed in his conduct,” Mr. Heinrich said. “He obviously had an oil and gas history, but he also had a clean energy history. And he just threw all of that away to be a partisan mouthpiece.”
Asked about Mr. Wright’s record, Ben Dietderich, an Energy Department spokesman, said: “Unlike past administrations that wasted billions of dollars on projects that made energy more expensive and our grid less secure, Secretary Wright and the Department are managing taxpayer dollars more responsibly. By realigning the Department, we are able to more effectively deliver on our mission of making energy more affordable, reliable and secure for the American people.”
Mr. Wright first gained prominence as the founder of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based oil-field services company that was heavily involved in the fracking boom.
Even among oil and gas executives, Mr. Wright stood out as an evangelist for fossil fuels. In 2021, as world leaders and even many oil companies were pledging to slash emissions, Mr. Wright published a 180-page report criticizing what he saw as a “myopic focus on climate change.”
He argued that people in developing countries still lacked enough energy to enjoy a decent standard of living and that renewables couldn’t replace oil, gas and coal to provide that power.
“At the height of this era when everyone was saying energy policy should just be about climate, Chris Wright was one of the few C.E.O.s that ran oil and gas firms who clearly and vocally spoke out,” said Arjun Murti, a partner at the energy research firm Veriten.
Mr. Wright also had a flair for the dramatic. He once drank fracking fluid on video to show it was safe. In 2021, he rented billboards around Denver to heckle The North Face after the company declined to work with an oil firm.
He landed appearances on Fox News and won the job of energy secretary on the recommendation of Harold Hamm, a fellow fracking pioneer and major donor to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Wright quickly transformed the department. Out were programs to develop novel technologies to fight climate change, like green hydrogen or low-emissions steel. Instead, federal funds went to help utilities finance gas plants, nuclear reactors and transmission lines or upgrade older coal plants, which officials say are essential for meeting rising electricity demand.
Mr. Wright also lifted a Biden-era pause on exporting liquefied natural gas, now the nation’s fastest-growing export, and has pressured Europe to ease rules on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, saying they could hurt U.S. exports.
“He brought a whole new attitude to the agency,” said Scott Segal, an energy lobbyist at Bracewell. “It’s all about how do we produce enough energy to support A.I. and economic growth.”
Some changes have attracted bipartisan support, such as Mr. Wright’s promotion of nuclear and geothermal energy, which don’t produce planet-warming emissions. His agency has dangled billions of dollars in loans to kick-start the largest expansion of nuclear power in a generation, while a program to help start-ups develop small reactors has moved faster than many expected.
Other moves have been more contentious.
To rescue the declining coal industry, an obsession of Mr. Trump’s, the Energy Department used emergency powers to keep plants running past their scheduled retirement dates, which could cost ratepayers billions. (This month, a federal judge struck down one such order, saying the agency had overstepped its authority.)
Last year, Mr. Wright picked five skeptics of mainstream climate science to write a report arguing that concerns about global warming were overblown. That report prompted furious pushback from hundreds of scientists, who denounced its findings as riddled with errors. A federal judge later ruled that Mr. Wright had acted unlawfully by secretly convening the authors.
Mr. Wright, who often criticizes wind and solar for not running at all hours, has cut renewable energy programs and renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as the National Laboratory of the Rockies. While experts agree that the variability of wind and solar poses real challenges, many say it goes too far to call the sources “worthless.” Texas gets roughly one-third of its power from renewables and has kept costs low.
“It’s borderline petty how anti-renewable this Energy Department is,” said Samantha Gross, a director at the Brookings Institution. “Especially since we’re still building more renewables, particularly solar, than any other form of energy in the U.S. right now.”
Roughly 2,700 staff members have left the agency, which analysts and former employees said could make it difficult to carry out its mission.
Mr. Wright’s supporters say he has helped steer the country away from what they saw as the Biden administration’s unrealistic plans to rapidly phase out fossil fuels.
Some say the debate is shifting in his direction. Many states and businesses are backing off ambitious climate targets, and Democrats are less vocal nowadays about climate change. Tech companies are using more natural gas to meet exploding demand for data centers. The International Energy Agency, after some browbeating by Mr. Wright, is revising up its projections for how long fossil fuels will stick around.
“There’s been a real shift in how investors and others now talk about energy,” said Travis Fisher, a director of energy and environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute who worked with Mr. Wright to organize the agency’s climate report. “Climate has become a lot less salient.”
The administration’s strategy faces its biggest test yet with the Iran war. While The Times reported that Mr. Wright was excluded from the decision to launch the war, he has been busy managing the energy fallout. He often appears on television to discuss U.S. military escorts of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. And he is quick to counter that Democratic-led states face high energy costs because of decisions to close refineries or oppose pipelines.
In the short term, the war and resulting energy shortages have benefited many U.S. suppliers, which are exporting more oil and gas than ever before. But in the long term, some experts and companies worry the chaos could hurt the market for fossil fuels, as countries seek to reduce reliance on energy imports.
Mr. Wright, for his part, says fossil fuels are too useful to recede anytime soon.
“We will never, ever come remotely close to running out of hydrocarbons, which means you need better technology and innovations to eventually eat into their market share,” Mr. Wright said at a Cato event in May.
He said he was excited about recent breakthroughs in areas like fusion. But, he added, “the biggest innovations the rest of my lifetime in energy are almost certainly going to be in oil, gas, and coal, because they are what matter.”
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